Childhood obesity is heavily documented as a public health crisis in the United
States. Today, more than one-third of American youth can be medically classified as
overweight or obese. Of those children, a disproportionately high number are Hispanic.
There is…

The United States education system is not meeting the needs of today’s youth, and
this is especially the case for minority and low socio-economic status youth. Although
there are a number of policy proposals that could improve youth academic performance,

Current global health interventions tend to focus on the “big 3” diseases:
malaria, AIDS, and tuberculosis. This focus has led to a dearth of funding for and
research into diseases that are also endemic in areas where the big 3…

The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan forced a revolution in military thinking that brought
stability operations to the forefront while coloring the military as one-part warrior, one part reluctant architect of peace. Despite years of experience in stability operations of…

International organizations and governments throughout the developing world have long provided agricultural extension services to farmers with the hopes of raising agricultural productivity and reducing rural poverty. These programs train farmers in modern agronomic techniques through instruction and demonstration, sometimes…

The aim of this thesis is to develop methods for variable selection and statistical prediction for high dimensional statistical problems. Along with proposing new and innovative procedures, this thesis also focuses on the theoretical properties of the proposed methods and…

Aquatic Microbial Oxygenic Phototrophs (AMOP's) capture carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and fix it into organic molecules used for growth and proliferation. However, the mechanisms that decide how photosynthetically fixed carbon is allocated between the major sinks (proteins, lipids, and…